In tournament play, sometimes the weekend is finished before it gets started.
That was certainly the case for the men’s tennis team, whose few remaining representatives at the ITA All-American Championships were eliminated Friday.
Ludovic Walter and Jason Zimmermann were the only two Blue Devils to advance to the main draw at the men’s tournament in Chattanooga, Tenn. The two played doubles together, and Walter also played in the singles tournament.
Walter and Zimmermann, the second-ranked pair in the tournament, advanced all the way to the quarterfinals. They were upset Friday by Mississippi State’s Luiz Carvalho and Jose-Carlos Pinto in an 8-6 heartbreaker.
The Duke pairing rushed out to a 3-1 lead but proceeded to lose three straight games. The 13th-seeded Bulldog duo traded service games with Walter and Zimmermann for the rest of the match en route to its victory.
Nonetheless, head coach Jay Lapidus was proud of his team’s effort.
“In men’s tennis it’s hard to have much consistency,” Lapidus said. “With all the big servers out there, there’s not much room for forgiveness. If you start out slow you just can’t get back into it. That’s why you see a lot of strange results and a lot of top seeds eliminated early in the doubles competition. The top seed went down in the second round. Having consistent performance in doubles is difficult. The fact that they made it to the late rounds of another major tournament shows how well they’ve been playing.”
Walter, ranked 19th in the singles competition, advanced to the round of 16, where he was met by Pepperdine’s Pedro Rico. Rico defeated the Duke junior 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 in a match that was closely contested to the very end.
“It was a very good match, a very high-quality match,” Lapidus said. “Ludovic told me he was feeling good about the way he was playing, and he thought was moving well. He got down one break in the third and actually had a chance to break back on a couple of occasions, and just couldn’t quite break through. Even though he lost, Ludovic thought he had played a very good match and wasn’t discouraged.”
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